Authors: Donna Leon
‘Meaning?’
‘I had to ask her to leave the Biblioteca.’
‘You mean fire her?’
Ford smiled. ‘Not exactly. She didn’t work here officially. I mean, not as a regular employee. She was a volunteer, and because she was working that way, it was easier to ask her to leave.’ He bowed his head but continued to speak. ‘It was still very difficult to ask her to leave, very embarrassing.’ When Brunetti seemed puzzled by this, Ford went on, ‘I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.’
Brunetti had no doubt that Claudia’s departure from the Biblioteca had been embarrassing, but he wasn’t certain that the explanation he had just been given accurately described its cause. He took his bottom lip between his thumb and first two fingers and fell into what he did his best to make look like a contemplative pose. ‘Did your wife know about this?’
Ford hesitated a moment before he answered; to Brunetti the fact of the hesitation, not its length, mattered.
‘I never said anything to her, if that’s what you mean,’ Ford said, not without suggesting that it
was
indiscreet of Brunetti to ask. Rather than point out that he had not answered the question, Brunetti simply waited and at last the Englishman said, ‘I’m afraid she may have noticed. Eleonora is very observant.’ With a man like this, Brunetti reflected, she’d have every reason to be.
‘Did you ever discuss the girl with your wife?’ Brunetti asked.
‘No, of course not,’ he protested, the injured gentleman. ‘Early on, I may have said something about her, that she was a good worker, but as I took no real interest in the girl I probably did nothing more than that.’
‘Did Claudia work for your wife or when your wife was here in the Biblioteca?’
‘Ah,’ Ford said with an easy smile, ‘I’m afraid I haven’t explained. My wife’s directorship is purely administrative. That is, she deals with the bureaucracy and the red tape from the city and regional offices who take an interest in our work.’ He tried a small smile. ‘Because she’s Italian, and more specifically because she’s Venetian, she knows how to manoeuvre her way around. I’m afraid I, as a foreigner, would be quite helpless.’
Brunetti smiled in return, thinking that, if there were any adjective that might be attributed to Mr Ford, ‘helpless’ most decidedly was not it.
‘Then what do you do, Signore?’
‘I attend to the daily running of the Biblioteca,’ Ford said.
‘I see,’ Brunetti answered, finally accepting Vianello’s conclusions about the real purpose of the Library.
Ford remained silent, a ghost of a smile on his lips. When it was evident that he had nothing further to say, Brunetti got to his feet, saying, ‘I’m afraid I still have to speak to your wife.’
‘She’ll be very upset by that.’
‘Why?’
The answer was some time in coming. ‘She was very fond of Claudia and I think it would upset her to talk about her death.’
Brunetti didn’t ask how she could have been so fond of a girl with whom her husband had suggested she had had almost no contact. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do about that, Signore. I have to speak to her.’
He watched Ford weigh the possible cost of opposing this demand. The man said he was not familiar with Italian bureaucracy, but anyone who had lived here for even a few years would know that, sooner or later, she would have to speak to the police. Brunetti waited patiently and allowed Ford more than enough time to decide. Finally he looked up at Brunetti and said, ‘All right. But I’d like to speak to her first.’
‘I’m afraid that’s impossible,’ Brunetti said quite equitably.
‘Only to assure her there’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Ford added.
‘I’ll be very careful to do that,’ Brunetti said, the firmness of his tone at odds with the pleasantness of what he said.
‘All right,’ Ford said, getting up and going towards the door to his office.
Again, Brunetti passed through the reading room. Both of the old men were gone and Vianello was now seated at one of the tables, the book open in front of him, seemingly so absorbed in it that he didn’t look up when the two men came out of Ford’s office. He did, however, tap the point of his pen on a sheet of paper which lay next to the book, a sheet that appeared to contain two names and addresses.
On the landing Ford waited for Brunetti, then led the way up the stairs. At the top he opened the single door without needing to unlock it. They could be in the middle of the countryside, with attentive neighbours careful to protect one another, not in the middle of a city besieged by thieves and burglars.
Inside, the simplicity of the rooms below was banished. On the floor of the entrance hall lay a Sarouk so thick and yet so richly coloured that Brunetti felt uncomfortably daring to walk on it while wearing shoes. Ford led him into a large sitting room that looked out to the
campo
on the other side of the canal. A celadon bowl in that extraterrestrial green that Brunetti had never liked sat on a low table in front of a beige satin-covered sofa.
Paintings, many of them portraits, hung from three walls; the fourth was lined with bookshelves. The centre of the room was covered with an enormous Nain, its pale arabesques in perfect harmony with the sofa.
‘I’ll just go and get her,’ Ford said, starting for the back of the apartment.
Brunetti held up a monitory hand. ‘I think it would be better if you called her, Signor Ford.’
Managing to look both confused and offended, Ford asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because I’d like to talk to her, without your saying anything to her first.’
‘I don’t see how that could possibly make a difference,’ Ford said, this time not confused but certainly offended.
‘I do,’ Brunetti said shortly, standing in place just to the left of the door of the room and only a short step from being able to block it with his body. ‘Please call her.’
Ford made a business of standing just inside the door and calling towards the back of the apartment, ‘Eleonora.’ There was no response, and he called again, ‘Eleonora.’
Brunetti heard a voice say something from the back, but it was impossible to distinguish what it said.
‘Could you come here a moment, Eleonora,’ Ford called.
Brunetti thought the man might add something, but he did not. A minute passed, another, and then both of them could hear a door closing at the back of the apartment. While he waited, Brunetti studied one of the portraits, an unhappy-looking woman in a wide starched ruff, her hair pulled severely back in a tight bun, looking out at the world in sharp disapproval of all she saw. He wondered who could have been so blind, or so cruel, to have such a portrait hanging in the house where Eleonora Filipetto lived.
Though he tried to stop himself, he found himself thinking the same thing when Eleonora Filipetto came into the room. Like the woman in the portrait, her hair was streaked with grey, but unlike hers, it hung limp and close to her head. Both women had the same tight, colourless lips that could so easily be pulled together in dissatisfaction, as the living woman’s were as she entered.
She recognized Brunetti, saw her husband, and chose to speak to Brunetti, ‘Yes? What is it?’ Her voice aimed at briskness but succeeded in seeming only nervous.
‘I’ve come to ask you some questions about Claudia Leonardo, Signora,’ he said.
She waited, looking at him, not asking why.
‘The last time we met, Signora, when I was asking about Claudia, you didn’t tell me you knew her.’
‘You didn’t ask me,’ she said, voice as flat as her bosom.
‘In such circumstances, you might have said more than that you recognized the name,’ he suggested.
‘You didn’t ask me,’ she repeated as though he had not just commented on that same answer.
‘What did you think of Claudia?’ Brunetti asked. He noticed that Ford made no attempt to catch her attention. In fact, he gradually moved over to the front of the room and stood by the window. When Brunetti glanced in his direction he saw that Ford was standing with his back to them, looking across at the façade of the church.
She looked across the room at her husband, as if she hoped to find the answer written on his back. ‘I didn’t think of her,’ she finally said.
‘And why is that, Signora?’ Brunetti inquired politely.
‘She was a young girl who worked in the Biblioteca. I saw her once or twice. Why should I think of her?’ Though the words were defiant, her tone had become more hesitant and uncertain, and she asked it as a real question, not a sarcastic one.
Brunetti decided he was tired of games. ‘Because she was a young woman, Signora, and because your husband has a history of finding young women attractive.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded too quickly, glancing at her husband.
‘It seems simple enough to me, Signora. I’m talking about what everyone seems to know: your husband’s tendency to betray you with younger women, more attractive women.’
Her face contorted, but not in pain or in any of the emotions he might have expected as a result of the remarks he had made sound as offhand and insulting as he could. If she looked anything, she looked startled, even shocked.
‘What do you mean, that people know? How can they know about it?’
Keeping his voice entirely conversational, he said, ‘In the reading room, when I was waiting, even the old men talked about it, about the way he was always grabbing at tits.’ He looked pointedly at her chest and slipped from the precisely articulated Italian he had been speaking into the
most
heavily accented and vulgar Veneziano, ‘I can see why he told me he likes to get his hands on a real pair of tits.’
She gasped so loud that Ford, who had understood nothing of what Brunetti had said in dialect, turned from the window. He saw his wife, hands clutched to her breast, staring open-mouthed at a calm and self-possessed Brunetti, who was leaning forward and saying politely, in precise Italian, ‘Excuse me, Signora. Is something wrong?’
She stood, mouth still open, drawing immense gulps of air into her lungs. ‘He said that? He said that to you?’ she gasped.
Ford moved quickly away from the window. He had no idea what was happening as he came towards his wife, his arms raised as if to embrace her protectively.
‘Get away from me,’ she said, voice tight, struggling to speak. ‘You said that to him?’ she hissed. ‘You said that after what I did for you? First you betray me with that little whore and then you say that about me?’ Her voice rose with every question, her face growing darker and more congested.
‘Eleonora, be quiet,’ Ford said as he drew even nearer. She raised a hand to push him away, and he put out one of his own to grab her arm. But she moved suddenly to the side, and his open hand came down, not on her wrist or her arm but on her breast.
She froze, and instinct or longing drove her forward, leaning into his hand, but then she pulled
sharply
back and raised a clenched fist. ‘Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me there, the way you touched that little whore.’ Her voice went up an octave. ‘You won’t touch her again, will you? Not with a knife in her chest where your hand was, will you?’ Ford stood, frozen with horror. ‘Will you?’ she screamed, ‘Will you?’ Suddenly she pulled her fist back and brought it crashing down once, twice, three times, into his chest as the two men stood there paralysed in the face of her rage. After the third blow, she moved away from him. As suddenly as it had started, her rage evaporated and she started to cry, great tearing sobs. ‘I did all of that for you, and you can still say that to him.’
‘Shut up!’ Ford shouted at her. ‘Shut up, you fool.’
Tears streaming from her eyes, she looked up at him and asked, voice choking with sobs, ‘Why do you always have to have pretty things? Both of you, Daddy and you, all you’ve ever wanted is pretty things. Neither of you ever wanted…’ Sobbing overcame her and choked off her last word, but Brunetti had no doubt that it was going to be ‘me’.
26
THOUGH FORD TRIED
to stop Brunetti with loud bluster, insisting that he had no right to arrest his wife, the woman offered no resistance and said that she would go along with him. Ford in their wake, hurling threats and the names of important people at their backs, Brunetti led her to the front door. Behind it they found Vianello, lounging up against the wall, his jacket unbuttoned and, to Brunetti’s experienced eye, his pistol evident in its holster.
Brunetti was in some uncertainty as to what to say to Vianello, as he wasn’t at all sure that what he had just heard Signora Ford say could be construed as a confession of murder. There had been no witness, save for Ford, and he could be counted upon to deny hearing what she had said or insist she’d said something else entirely. It
depended
, then, on his getting her to repeat her confession in Vianello’s hearing or, even better, on getting her to the Questura, where she could record it or speak it while being videotaped. He knew that a future case based on his word alone would be laughed at by any prosecuting magistrate with experience in the courtroom; indeed, it would be laughed at by anyone with experience of the law.
‘I’ve called for a boat, sir,’ Vianello said quite calmly when he saw them. ‘It should be here soon.’
Brunetti nodded, as though this were the most normal thing in the word for Vianello to have done.
‘Where?’ he asked.
‘At the end of the
calle
,’ Vianello said.
‘You can’t do this,’ Ford again insisted, putting himself at the top of the steps and blocking Brunetti’s path. ‘My father-in-law knows the Praetore. You’ll be fired for this.’
Brunetti didn’t have to say a word. Vianello went over to Ford, said, ‘
Permesso
,’ and moved him bodily to one side, freeing the stairway for his wife and Brunetti to start down. Brunetti didn’t look behind him, but he could hear the Englishman arguing, then shouting, then making grunting noises that must have resulted from a futile attempt to shift Vianello from the top of the steps so that he could follow his wife.
The sun gleamed down, even though it was November and meant to be much colder. As they emerged from the building, Brunetti heard the motor of a boat from their right, and he led the
silent
woman down towards it. A police launch swept up to the steps at the end of the
calle
and stopped; at their approach, a uniformed officer set a wide piece of planking between the gunwales and the embankment, then helped the woman and Brunetti on board.